Objectivity, propaganda, and honest brokers. Digby has some reaction over at Hullaballo to yesterday's post on the Dana Millbank thumbsucker and my offer of at least two cheers (based on a reading of press history) to partisanship in journalism.

It appears to me that some of the conditions that created the concept of "Objective Journalism" in the first place have strongly re-emerged. The right is not running a partisan press. It is running a corrupt partisan propaganda machine based on the techniques of public relations and paid for by big money interests. That's why I was a bit rueful in my piece the other day. I don't particularly want to be part of a propaganda machine. I have no problem being a fiery partisan and working hard to persuade people to my side. But outright lying for the cause turns my stomach. And that's what the other side does.

But at this point I am resigned to the idea that we are going to have a partisan media battle for the forseeeable future so I'm not fighting it. It may, as Michael suggests, turn out to be a good thing in the long run, revitalizing our political system and getting people engaged. In the meantime, however, I would very much like the allegedly non-aligned media to come out from behind their absurd notion that they are objective because "both sides complain so they must be doing something right" and simply report when people are not presenting the facts accurately. That's all I want. When you have the government, business and the radical right consistently cooking the truth you really need somebody, somewhere who can be an honest broker of the facts.

A comment I left over at Digby's joint properly belongs in this space as well. To wit: The phrase Digby uses, "honest broker of the facts," makes an extremely apt contrast with "objective," an ideological term rapidly and I think rightly becoming discredited. And it brings up the thought, which was lurking in the background of my earlier post (and which a late-night writing spell did nothing to help articulate), that we may be witnessing the birth of an opportunity, against a flagrantly propagandistic right-wing media, for a responsible left-wing media to assume the honest broker's role for at least a significant piece of the American electorate.

Not only don't we want to lie for the cause, it's against our interests to do so. We don't need to become propagandists to fight the propaganda wars. I think to the extent that it's fair in the way it assesses antithetical perspectives, and forthright and transparent in its arguments from fact, a left media has a chance at establishing trust, where Fox and the like have already flagrantly thrown away any opportunity at that, at least for an audience that hasn't already drunk Roger Ailes' Kool-Aid. The discourse that's emerged within the left-liberal blogosphere seems to me, by and large, a model for the style of engagement that might well be able to gain a wider (and more politically salient) reach than we now have.

And in the "by the way" department, Digby discusses the history, and clarifies something I might (late night, as I said) have left vague:

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that the partisan press began to die out around the turn of the last century with the commercialization of the press and the big media barons (along with the general revulsion amongst the population at the corruption of the parties.) And I think that journalism reacted strongly to the new field of public relations in the 20's and 30's by developing this professional code of objectivity quite a while before the cold war.

The dying out of the partisan press took a long time, and has its beginnings in the early part of the last century: my reference to the Cold War had specifically to do with the installation of the "objective" press, which by then pretty much commanded the field, as a kind of constitutional partner with government. Down the (typically interesting) comments thread, one of Digby's other readers mentions the movie His Girl Friday, and the great scene in the press room after Earl Williams' escape, to talk about the earlier era's common understanding of the (flagrant) subjectivity of the print press. (The movie's critique, significantly, doesn't emerge from a standard of "objectivity," but of moral engagement—its horror is for the crushing uninterest of the "gentlemen of the press," to use a phrase Rosalind Russell makes scalding, in the human cost of their hunger for story.) Worth remembering that the movie was made as late as 1940, from the 1928 Hecht-MacArthur play. Incidentally, His Girl Friday is one of my all-time favorite Hollywood movies, possibly Cary Grant's best performance ever in a comedy, and it's not only a marvelous, vivid source for anyone interested in the history of American journalism, it's an extraordinary artistic document as well. (Ask me sometime about the virtuosity with which Howard Hawks creates a moral rhetoric of enclosed spaces in the film.) If you've never seen it, you must rent yourself a copy pronto. You won't be disappointed.

Thinking of the way HGF depicts the print press—and remembering how young journalism on radio was, still, at the time—it's worth noting that one piece of the history here that I haven't attested to is the extent to which radio played a hand in creating an expectation of objectivity, and led to the enforcement of a new standard on the older print press. (I think there's an argument to be made that the technology of broadcast, as well as its economics, lent itself very readily to tropes of "objective" journalistic practice, but it's beyond me at the moment to develop that MacLuhanesque hunch further.) There may be some relevance in this to the engagement of blogs with traditional media that we're seeing now.

posted by michael  5:16:51 PM  
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All theocrats are pretty much alike, and Juan Cole has the goods today on how that applies to our plague of Congressional theocrats:

The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model.

The Muslim fundamentalists use a provision of Islamic law called "bringing to account" (hisba). As Al-Ahram weekly notes, "Hisba signifies a case filed by an individual on behalf of society when the plaintiff feels that great harm has been done to religion." ... In this practice, any individual can use the courts to intervene in the private lives of others.

Cole goes on to discuss a case in which a happily married couple were forced to flee Egypt rather than submit to court-ordered divorce when the husband, a scholar of Koranic law, was accused of sacrilege for having argued in favor of the equality of women. Uncomfortably reminiscent of the Frist-DeLay intervention in the private life of a married couple, eh?

All theocrats are pretty much alike, but some theocrats are bigger pansies than others. Witness Robert Brom, Catholic Archbishop of San Diego:

The head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego apologized Monday to the family of gay nightclub owner John McCusker, less than a week after decreeing that McCusker couldn't have a Catholic burial because of his "business activities," according to a statement released by McCusker's family.

In a stunning twist to a controversy that has created an uproar in the San Diego gay and Catholic communities, Bishop Robert Brom also promised to preside at a mass in memory of McCusker at The Immaculata Catholic church on the campus of the University of San Diego.

[Link thanks to Suburban Guerilla.] One good—or bad—PR turn deserves another, I guess. Think Bishop Bob's apology comes from an attack of conscience, or just an upset stomach? And here he thought a big public show of fag-hating was gonna earn him points ...

Speaking as an ex-Catholic, one of the many nasty legacies of the current Pope is his installation in the American episcopate of preening right-wingers like Brom, self-promoters who figure that intolerance sells, at least when it comes to advancement in the hierarchy. As a further instance, take (please!) Raymond Burke, Archbishop in my hometown of St. Louis, who attached himself to last year's "controversy" over John Kerry being denied communion as a pro-choice politician by suggesting in an interview that Catholics who voted for pro-choice candidates would put themselves in a state of sin requiring confession. Burke, too, was forced to "soften his stance" when he came in for criticism in the preparation of a voter guide for St. Louis Catholics that appeared ready to make Burke's earlier warning official. (The Bish, by the way, has his right-wing victimization tropes down pat: here he is suggesting to a like-minded audience that if you criticize the Catholic stance on abortion and homosexuality, you're persecuting the Church.)

posted by michael  9:28:17 AM  
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